Journey to the Emerald City

Step into the story. Follow the road. Find your way to the Emerald City.

Created by The Oliver Twins

A story you don't just read. You play it.

Journey to the Emerald City is a beautifully illustrated story-led puzzle adventure for ages 8+, created by The Oliver Twins.

Read the story. Collect the cards. Solve puzzles. Decode secret messages. Make discoveries. Follow clues. 

A book. A game. A box full of secrets.

As you travel through Oz, the story calls upon the physical objects inside your box. You might need the 52-card adventure deck to uncover a character or clue. You might have to turn the cipher wheel to decode a hidden message. You might need to write, solve, search or make a decision.

Eventually, when the story lets you, you'll break the seal and unfold your sealed Map of Oz.

Everything in Journey to the Emerald City has been designed to make you feel less like someone reading about an adventure...and more like the person having it. Just like it feels when you are playing one of our legacy video games. 

In our version of Oz the reader is the hero

There's something unusual about our version of Oz.

There is no Dorothy.

That's because you take her place.

The reader becomes the traveller swept from Kansas into Oz, so the hero can be a child, parent, grandparent, boy, girl… anyone who opens the book.

Play alone or solve it together.

Open the box. Start reading. The story does the rest. It's the prefect collectable gift.

What's inside the Box?

Every First Edition of Journey to the Emerald City includes:

• 📖 Illustrated interactive storybook — your journey from Kansas to the Emerald City
• 🃏 52-card Adventure Deck — characters, clues and objects from the story, plus a playable deck afterwards. At least 12 classic games can be played with the deck.
• 🗺️ Sealed fold-out Map of Oz — do not open it until the story tells you to
• 🔐 Cipher Wheel — rotate it to decode hidden messages and solve story clues
• ✏️ Activity puzzle book and pencil — themed puzzles to keep your brain active
• ⭐ Themed stickers
• 🔖 Bookmark - beautifully illustrated to inspire you.

This isn't a book with a few extras thrown into the box. The box is part of the story.

Illustrated interactive storybook

The interactive storybook is designed to allow the reader to make choices and vary how they travel through Oz. There are clues along the way and the book uses the card map and cipher wheel to help tell the story interactively. The book also contains instructions for the card games.

The 52-card Adventure Deck

This might be one of our favourite parts of the whole box.

We've created a full 52-card deck, beautifully illustrated with characters, objects and imagery from the adventure. There are at least 12 games to be played with this deck, and you can make up more for yourselves. The deck features the symbols for a traditional card deck as well as symbols for games we have specially created. 

Two-Sided Sealed Map of The Emerald City

We have designed a map so you can imagine adventuring through Oz to the Emerald City. The map remains sealed until the story tells you to open it. You can also use this as wall art, as the reverse is a stunning poster of Oz.

Cipher Disc / Colour Spinner

Our Cipher disc serves two purposes. To decode and encode messages during and after the story. The reverse is a colour spinner used in game play.

Stickers Bookmark and Activity Book.

A set of beautiful stickers are included, which you can use to decorate something special, and a stunning bookmark too. The activity book is packed full of puzzles and quizzes themed on Journey to the Emerald City.

Prototypes → Production

What you see throughout this page is a mix of our original artwork, production visuals, working prototypes, and mock-up artwork created from the game's artwork. Pre-production samples will be landing during the campaign, and we will share those updates with you.

As The Oliver Twins, we have a long history of record-breaking game development. We have experience delivering products to market. 

We've already been printing, testing, handling and refining the physical components so that we can check how the adventure works away from the computer screen.

Now we're ready for the exciting bit: turning our prototype into a beautiful First Edition.

From video games... to an adventure without the screen

As the Oliver Twins, we have spent most of our lives making games.

We started creating computer games as teenagers in the 1980s, went on to create Dizzy, build game studios, and spend decades designing interactive entertainment.

So perhaps it's slightly strange that our newest idea started with a question:

Could we make a video-game-style adventure that didn't need a screen?

We'd been thinking about how much time we all now spend looking at screens, particularly children, and about the ongoing debate around social media and young people.

We love games. We certainly weren't about to start arguing that games are bad.

Instead, we wondered whether some of the things that make games brilliant could work without a screen.

Exploration.
Discovery.
Problem-solving.
Storytelling.
The excitement of unlocking something new. 

Could we put all of that into a beautiful physical object? Because we miss those lovely DVD covers and game boxes we used to line up on our shelves.

What we came up with is a stunningly high-quality design that is going to scream 'keep me' and want to be lined up proudly on a bookshelf. We have used the same size and dimensions as a DVD or games box set. Our box is also gravity-open (like the iPhone box), giving it a super high-quality feel. This product is plastic-free and recyclable. It has been made to collect, treasure and gift. 

Why Oz?

For our first Active Brain Game, we needed a world made for adventure. And few journeys are quite as wonderful as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

We've visited Oz before in our gaming lives, including in Wonderful Dizzy, so we already knew how naturally its characters, locations and challenges lend themselves to interactive storytelling.

But this time we went back to the beginning. Not the film. The original book. We returned to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900, and the wonderful original illustrations of W. W. Denslow.

And we discovered that the Oz many of us think we know isn't always the Oz Baum actually wrote. That became an adventure in itself.

Why Kickstarter?

Because this feels like exactly what Kickstarter was made for. We've created the concept, story, artwork and prototypes. Now we need to manufacture it.

Your support will help fund:

The first production run • final production artwork • print preparation • packaging • cards • maps • cipher wheels • books and physical components

But Kickstarter gives us something else too.

It lets the first people who believe in Active Brain Games help us bring it to life.

And if enough of you join us, we'll be able to make this First Edition even more special through carefully costed stretch goals and campaign extras.

We have big ambitions for Active Brain Games and lots of original stories and ideas to follow Journey to the Emerald City. This is just the first step on that journey.

And for our Dizzy and gaming fans... 👀

ALL PLEDGES OF PHYSICAL PRODUCT WILL RECEIVE AN ORIGINAL DIZZY BADGE 

We are recreating original Dizzy in a highly collectable badge. The badge will be produced using the design created by The Oliver Twins for the original 8Bit Dizzy!

Our Dizzy Collectors Edition

This special edition includes a signed A3 poster from our Dizzy archives. We are limiting this set to only 200 so these are going to be in short supply!

And there's more!

We are currently looking through our archives and planning some collectable Oliver Twins and gaming treasures 🥚, including artwork that we think some of you might recognise.

They will appear in the pledge manager after our campaign is successful. 

We don't want to spoil all the secrets just yet. 😁

Put down the screen. Open the box. Step into the story.

We hope you'll join us for the first journey.

Philip & Andrew Oliver
The Oliver Twins